The Strange Tale of the Disappearing Country
- September 22, 2019
- by
- Matt
I’ve been abroad in the Pyrenees for nearly three weeks now and it was, as it always is these days, a huge relief to be away from these septic isles. Of course you don’t forget them. Nowadays, you take Brexit with you in your mental baggage, even if you never meant to pack it. It’s...
Johnson and Trump: That’s Entertainment
- August 27, 2019
- by
- Matt
If there’s one thing that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have in common, it’s their propensity for lying. Where politicians like Blair and Bush lied and massaged facts to realise specific agendas, both these politicians at least recognised that truth existed and that it was important for politicians to make it seem as though it mattered.
Johnson...
Comrade Johnson: When Boris Met Sasha
- July 22, 2019
- by
- Matt
On the eve of Boris Johnson’s coronation as PM, I have a counterfactual for you, readers.
Imagine that we’re in 2015 in the middle of the Labour Party leadership contest. All polls suggest that Jeremy Corbyn is going to win. Only days before his inevitable election a Reuters reporter publishes a story alleging that Corbyn is...
The Resistible Rise of Boris the Clown
- June 26, 2019
- by
- Matt
Yesterday morning I watched Boris Johnson give two absolute car crash interviews on LBC and Talk Radio. It was hard to know which of them was the worst: the one in which he refused to answer Nick Ferrari’s question regarding the date of his ‘Boris and Carrie’ photo, or the one in which he mumbled...
The Tory Party Has Gone Missing
- June 21, 2019
- by
- Matt
Some readers may have heard of the mass hallucinations that took place at the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951. As John Grant Fuller describes it in The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, on 15 August that year the entire village of 250 inhabitants woke up and began seeing visions. One man sat down to...
A Plague of Bastards
- March 28, 2019
- by
- Matt
If it’s true that people get the kind of politicians they deserve, then the British public must have sinned a great deal. Just take a look at the events of the last few days. On Monday, as readers of this blog may remember, Boris Johnson began the week on the front page of the Daily...
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